Corel is now listening. Post your Painter wishlist here!

[Lunatique]

Thanks to Jinny Brown's referral, I've managed to open up direct dialogue with Corel's Program Manager, and I've got her full attention. She wants to know what the most prolific professionals such as yourselves feel/think about Painter 8, or Painter in general. This is your chance to be heard, by the person that makes decisions. No red tape, no B.S. Step up, the mic is on.

[Jason Manley]

here is some info....

http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?threadid=50


j

[Lunatique]

Yes, I already forwarded all of them to Corel, and they've heard. But this wishlist should be for everything you've ever wanted in Painter, not just specific to Painter 8.

[Roam]

I think an interesting feature would be if we could somehow scan our own paper into the program, and it gets converted to an actual canvas we can paint on, mimicking the actual paper material scanned in.

[Fozzybar]

...don't know if this already is fixed in Painter 8...but i missed a compability to photoshop's layer-groups (don't know the word...like a directory for your layers)...

[Steve Green]

Well...

OK, a few suggestions from the viewpoint of using Painter to create maps for 3D models. It's more a wishlist for usability rather than the painting side of things, which (speed of large brushes apart) is pretty good.

1. It would be very handy if Painter could save out TGA files with alpha channels (PNG would be useful as well)

At the moment I have to save as PSD, take them into Photoshop and flatten them, then save it. Or paint any alpha in Photoshop.


2. Being able to permanently rotate the canvas 90 degrees for non square canvas.

3. The ability to non-uniform rescale a canvas.


4. I can't find a way to do this, so I'm presuming they've been removed - but please reinstate tear-off custom palettes for brushes/paper etc.

5. The ability to resize dialogues palettes. Dual screens are becoming more affordable, and it would be helpful to be able to make more use of them. The colour wheel seems very small now.

Thanks,

Steve

[sandman]

Here is a suggestion;

The brush creator is okay as it goes, but it currently acts more like a stand alone application. What I would like to see is the brush creator palette leaving as it is, but an extra button adding to the brush selector bar which will open a duplicate drop down of the left hand side of the brush creator palette. The brush controls drop down in the brush selector bar would be opened and closed via clicking the button. This way, brush adjustments can be made more conveniently without having to keep switching from the existing brush creator palette and back to the canvas (and in a similar way to Painter 7's brush controls).

I don't know anything about programming, but I'm assuming that the button would act as an alias to access existing code already incorporated into Painter 8 as part of the brush creator palette. Below is a picture of what I envisage the modified brush selector bar could look like (with controls button pressed once to display the drop down menu);



David

[Jin]

Originally posted by Roam
I think an interesting feature would be if we could somehow scan our own paper into the program, and it gets converted to an actual canvas we can paint on, mimicking the actual paper material scanned in.

Roam,

If I understand what you're saying, you can already do that.

Scan the paper and that image can be your Canvas.

or...

Scan the Paper, capture it as a Paper, open a new Canvas, and with the new Paper selected, paint with Grainy brushes or use Effects > Surface Control > Apply Surface Texture.

or...

Scan the Paper, open a new Canvas, in the File > Clone Source menu, check the scanned Paper file name, and using, for instance, the Impasto's Grain Emboss variant set to Draw to: Color and Depth, Depth Method: Original Luminance, paint to add texture to the Canvas or Layer. (You could, alternatively, set Depth Method: Paper, providing you've captured the Paper and it's the current Paper.)

If none of the above address your wish, how about explaining it in more detail, so Tanya willl understand what you mean?

[Steve Green]

A few more suggestions

1.I would like Corel to take a look at Max or Maya and the way they use quad menus when you click and hold down on an icon (or right click in there case)

In Painter, some of the toolbar icons fly out when you click on them, but the shortcuts at the bottom of the bar expand, but then you need to manually scroll down, and pick the paper (or whatever) again.

What would be simpler (IMHO) is to have the pen highlight the selection and auto scroll, since it would be one action rather than two.


2.I would also like them to fix the problem with adjusting brightness and contrast/equalising an image on freehand selection. What happens at the moment is that the bounding box gets adjusted.


3. It would make more sense if the same keyboard shortcut for the canvas (Alt) could be used to pick up colours from the mixing palette.

Thanks,

Steve

[sandman]

I always liked the idea of having a small floating magnified window which displayed the area around the cursor whist painting, rather than having to keep zooming in and out.

Up until recently, I had tried various shareware magnification utilities, but the brush strokes in the magnifying window aways seemed to lag behind the canvas brush stroke. I then found one which exhibited no noticable time lag, so I could view the brush stroke in sync with that on canvas click here

The above utility sems to have some software conflicts on my Mac (O.S 10.2.5) causing some of the coloristic features not to function. I can however right click over the magnification window to change magnifications on the fly by means of a contextual menu (1,2,4,8,16 and 42x).

My suggestion is to incorporate a feature like this into Painter 8, but with an added extra which will allow the magnification window to automatically convert to a 'floating colour chip' as colours are picked. ie, as the cursor/ eye dropper moves over the standard colour picker palette, mixing palette or colour set, the window is completely filled with the colour under the curser. As soon as the stylus is lifted away and back to the canvas, the floating window reverts back to magnification mode. The colour chip feature would allow an enlarged and direct comparitive view betwen picked colour and adjacent colours already on the canvas. The floating window could also be dragged to a second monitor screen perhaps.

Below is a demo. There would in reality only be one floating window present;



David

[Dan Milligan]

I like the new interface.

I wish "method" and "sub-catagory" were on the control strip and not just in the Brush Creator. I like to change these settings on the fly and going into the brush creator breaks up the speed and rhythm found in the old interface.(resat,bleed and jitter are. why not these?)

The lasso tool can be inaccurate.(hang over from Painter 7

Rotating a layer causes it to soften or blur. (I'm not talking about rotating the canvas.)

P.S.
I'm working in OSX 10.2.6

Thanks for listening

[Aaross]

I agree with Mr Milligan. The interface is much nicer. How about a preview on the distort command so you can see the distort before you commit (like Photoshop). Also, I can't make "restore varient" a customized key like I could in P7- a small point but one I was fond of using.

[sandman]

Originally posted by Aaross
Also, I can't make "restore varient" a customized key like I could in P7- a small point but one I was fond of using.

I'll second that. I always set F2 to 'restore default variant'. This link to a function key is not do-able in Painter 8. I can access restore default variant using the brushes contextual menu (right click) though, but I miss that button click

David

[Vin]

I always seem to have a problem with the Painter [7 or 8] program lagging. I have over a gig of ram and dual prossesors, however when I try to use a brush bigger then 4.3 [smooth camel hair/oils] I get a message saying there isn't enough memory to preform...what gives?

[Dan Milligan]

Amen brothers,

Make "restore varient" function key programable! A preview on "distort" would be great also.

[Steve Green]

For those of us using Painter to create textures, it would be useful to be able to separate out the Impasto/Thick variants so that the value used for the impasto look can be saved out as a separate image for use as a bump map in a 3D program.

Thanks,

Steve

[sandman]

In the 'size' section of the brush creator>stroke designer, I would like to see a bounding box around the currently selected brush profile icon.

Also, I would like the option not to treat the canvas colour as a colour for the purposes of blending. i.e, if I lay another colour on a white canvas, I want the applied media colour to thin and become more transparent whilst smudging, not mixing with the white. In other words, for the canvas to be colour fast.

David

[mime]

what i would love to see is :

* fusion mode not only for layers as it is right now (multiply, color, saturation, etc)
but also for single brush, like in photoshop. I know for now we already have buildup, cover, etc ... but some hard light, soft light, color, saturation, etc ... would be lovely

* pattern tools
i love the pattern chalk brush and the variations of it, but i think too bad that pattern brushes only react by following the movement of the strokes (ie : the pattern is always perpendicular to the line of the stroke)
I would LOVE to be able to use pattern chalk like the palette knife for example, to be able to assign the orientation to bearing, tilt, and not only to the stroke direction ...
and also, the circles happening with pattern tools, and brush using the stroke direction is really annoying sometimes, if you slow down your stroke too much, it starts doing those annoying circles ...

*zoom
please fix the ctrl + and ctrl - zoom, i know we can set the % steps of the zoom in the preferences, but it is only linked to the alt+space bare shortcut, not with ctrl + and ctrl -.
Zoom is much more efficient in photoshop, where the values are fixed
12.5% 25% 33% 50% 66% 100% 200% 300%
it is quicker and more time effective, and if you need another zoom value you can always use the ctrl+space bar and select the area where to zoom with a box.
and also i find the quality of the zoom less accurate than in photoshop.

*random paper texture
the option to have the paper texture works at random for every stroke doesnt work with the pattern chalk and some other tools ...
with classic dry medias it works fine (ie location of paper grain moves at every stroke) but with the pattern chalk, even if i check the random option, the paper stay always at the same position ...

*the brush used in the mixer palette
I love this brush ... but i cant at all find how to reproduce it to paint, it is in the mixer palette and only there ... I tried to do experiments with the sargent brush, and other brushes, but no methods or tweak create a brush working similar. Why have you created a new brush for the mixer palette, and not having it usable to simply paint ... ?


thanxs for this wonderful program, but i hope some of this issues will be looked at

[Pat Duke]

I'd like to preface my post by saying this is clear and away the best version of Painter yet. Some additions/fixes I'd like to see:

1) Save bug still exists. For instance: if you save a file once, modify it, begin the save dialogue (command s) and then cancel it, the modified file overwrites the previous version. But I cancelled! How does this bug continually make it past beta checkers?

2) Calligraphic brush on/off. Painter automatically assumes that in most brush types the angle of the stroke should follow the angle of the direction of the stroke. Most of the time this is highly desirable, however there are times it is not. For instance: painting with the scratchboard tool at 50% opacity. As you move the brush around, the inside of the stroke displays artifacting from the angle change. If this could be turned off this would answer one of the more pressing needs of Photoshop painters as well: a direct add Photoshop emulating brush.

3) Please bring back the custom palettes. Make them dockable, even! I can live without the other interface tweaks (patterns in my menus, the ability to change the main documents background color) but the custom palettes were a real timesaver. The brush tracker, while cool, is no substitute.

4) Minor interface bugs. There are some minor interface bugs now. The toolbox occasionally renders with a line through the bottom Patterns and Weaves selector, as if the window was supposed to only include the upper two Gradiants and Paper selectors. This happens rarely, and it's merely cosmetic, but I've seen it two or three times. Second: the dockable brush selector in the upper right hand corner disappears occasionally. This also happens rarely, but you miss it dearly because when it's gone work comes to a halt.

5) Smear brushes on layers can produce a shimmering effect when set to default and pick up underlying colors is on. Utterly annoying and possibly uncorrectable. Just FYI.

6) Digital Watercolors can degrade color information. Under certain settings (usually the absense of grain) applying digital watercolors to an image will cause it to develop a posterized look. I like the fact that the digital watercolor information is on it's own watercolor layer and operates similar to the old Painter 6 watercolor brush... but I'm really missing the old "Clear Water Color Layer" menu option. As it stands, if you severely mess something up with Digital Watercolors your only option to remove it is to paint over with white.

7) The new XML definitions are cool, but is having 3 seperate files to define a brush necessary? This means exchanging brushes (the primary reason behind making them XML files to begin with?) more difficult. Why was there no Painter 7->Painter 8 brush importing utility? And for that matter, why do the Painter 7 brushes on the second install CD not function properly in Painter 8? Minor quibbles, to be sure, but annoying ones for people with a large library of custom brushes requiring conversion. Also, there's apparently been an alteration in the Pressure Scale setting under brush tracking. When I finally recreated some of my custom brushes in Painter 8, they didn't function the same. It took a good while to realize why --a heads up in the readme would have been nice and prevented a LOT of frustration to some artists. Thanks for finally making Painter save brush tracking settings between sessions.

8) I rarely mess with it, but friends have been reporting that color managment doesn't always load properly.

9) The new color mixing palette is great. I love the tools. Please include XML files for those brushes so I can use them on the canvas as well!

10) I'm curious as to the reason for the exclusion of third party packaged plug-in support being dropped. Frankly, I rarely used them so I'm not missing the functionality. But for some people it can be an issue.

11) Enhanced animation capabilities. I know this isn't Painter's strongest sell point, but the animation capabilities of Painter have remained unchanged since their inception. How about the ability to dynamically change visible levels of onion-skinning on the fly? Or even updating the frame stack menu a bit so it's consistant with the rest of the floating palettes; I'd love to be able to just turn it off --but it stays open all the time. How about the ability to change the frame preview icon sizes, or even the ability turn them off.

12) Thanks for improving the magic wand tool. I'd like to see the lasso tool with the ability to anchor, much as if I were to push the alt key with Photoshop's lasso tool. I know Painter has other methods to accomplish this (shapes being a good example) but they're all cumbersome.

13) Color Sets palette issues. The last row of color chips on the right side of the color sets palette can literally be covered up by edge of the window without them being forced to realign to the bottom row. Minor annoyance.

14) Ability to move the origin X Y position of paper textures. Right now, this can't be done. The first time I realized you could grab and scroll paper textures I thought this would shift the grain pattern so I could go over the same area and not get the exact same grain. The ability to move this would allow you to get far more mileage out of the same paper textures.

15) LZW compression support for saves. Prepress guys like myself have to save tifs. As it stands, we have to rely on Photoshop to compress them now. I'm guessing the logic behind supporting LZW compression for opening files is tied to Photoshop's annoying tendency to automatically compress certain file types. Would enabling it for saving incure a liscensing issue?

16) Additional file type support. I'd suggest at least the ability to save targa formatted files. Maybe PNG support too?

17) Preservation of Photoshop file comments. Resaving Photoshop files automatically deletes file comments, bylines, copyright info, etc. Giving Painter the ability to read those might be nice too.

That's all I can think off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more; if I think of them I'll append this post.

-Pat

[linK]

I'm playing with the demo now, but I noticed that in Painter 7, the program would save the 5 recently used brushes. I really liked that and wish Painter 8 had it.

[sandman]

In the right hand brush creator 'test' window, I would like a menu option to create a test canvas of two or four different colours (split horizontally and/or vertically down the canvas centre line).

This would enable me to test blending and plugin brushes which do not add colour to the canvas, but rather act upon existing colour.

It is possible to do this by first selecting a cover brush variant and then switching back and forth between the colour palette in order to prepare the test canvas, but this is long winded and as soon as hit the clear button I'm back to a white canvas. I then have to re-colour the canvas before brush trial can recommence.

David

[Philippe]

Originally posted by sandman
I always liked the idea of having a small floating magnified window which displayed the area around the cursor whist painting, rather than having to keep zooming in and out.

If you install the Developer Tools (free from Apple) for MacOSX, there is a utility called "Pixie" that does what you are asking for.

Works great, I use it all the time instead of squinting at the screen when arranging details on the screen.

[Philippe]

Originally posted by linK
I'm playing with the demo now, but I noticed that in Painter 7, the program would save the 5 recently used brushes. I really liked that and wish Painter 8 had it.

The Tracker palette gives you similar functionality, it saves the last 25 brushes.

[Philippe]

Originally posted by Pat Duke

2) Calligraphic brush on/off.

6) Digital Watercolors can degrade color information.

7) The new XML definitions are cool, but is having 3 seperate files to define a brush necessary?

10) I'm curious as to the reason for the exclusion of third party packaged plug-in support being dropped.

2) If I'm not mistaken, you can set how the angle of the pen affects the brush. Check the "Expression" popup menus in the Brush Creator.

6) Painter 6 watercolor was, in fact, its own layer on the canvas. Digital watercolor affects everything on a normal layer (as you have noticed). You can create a new layer and only paint with digital watercolor there, acheiving the same effect. There are commands for drying the digital water on the current layer...

7) Only the XML file is essential to the brush; that's what you can send to others to share your brushes. The ".stk" and ".nib" files are created on the fly, they are the stroke and nib previews, respectively.

10) Packaged plug-ins are not supported because they would require supporting Photoshop 6+ functionality. Painter only supports the Photoshop 3 functions, if I remember correctly. It's a significant job to implement the application-side support for Photoshop plugins...

hth, Philippe

[Philippe]

Originally posted by sandman
In the right hand brush creator 'test' window, I would like a menu option to create a test canvas of two or four different colours (split horizontally and/or vertically down the canvas centre line).

The canvas can only have one color, as you have noticed. I suggest that you create a file with your favorite color smears, and use it as a scratchpad by putting it next to the Brush Creator. When you are done testing your brushes, simply revert the file to start over.

Philippe

[sandman]

Thanks for the work around Philippe

I'll check out that 'Pixie' utiliy you mentioned too.

David

[mun]

thank god painter 8 changed its layout, the old one took up soooo much real estate on the screen.

what I would like to see in a future version is a HSV slider bar. So I can make minute changes incrementally like in Photoshop. I find manipulating the little color picker in the color wheel annoying since it jumps a bit before you actually start dragging.

[Philippe]

Originally posted by mun
what I would like to see in a future version is a HSV slider bar. So I can make minute changes incrementally like in Photoshop. I find manipulating the little color picker in the color wheel annoying since it jumps a bit before you actually start dragging.

That feature already exists in Painter 8: just open the "Color Info" window (if you haven't already done so), and click on the black triangle in the top-left. Select "Display as HSV" in the popup menu, and voilà! HSV sliders

Philippe

[mun]

phillipe, oops.

I wuz hasty. Thanks a bunch for pointng that out. I like it even more now. U da man!!

[Jack]

I'd like to see the return of the custom palettes.
Also, in the brush tracker, I'd like to see the brushes
retain the color used with each one. As it is now, if I change colors with different brushes, and then go back to a previous brush, it uses the current color instead of the color used originally.